Tag: Happy Ending
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Good for Spain!
A Spanish company and an Italian company have teamed up to help Venezuela maintain and expand its petroleum production. It’s good to see Spain playing its old role as genuine neutral. It joined the Sorosian crowd for a while after 2017. Spain and Portugal, formerly huge imperialists, learned a lesson and stayed out of the…
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Positive signs from the neighborhood (redated)
Jan 13, 2026: For 20 years a vacant apartment building was the worst thing in the neighborhood, constantly squatted and constantly visited by cops who weren’t allowed to do anything. This situation was NOT understandable. The property was owned by an LLC who could afford to fix things if they wanted to. In 2017 the…
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Copying the New Deal
Good is good no matter who does it. Bad is bad no matter who does it. In 2020 Trump did the evilest thing in 70 years, and the most widespread evil in all of human history. In his second term his admin is doing the standard American evil things like bombing foreign countries and enriching…
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Wow, that’s unimpressive.
Yesterday I was noticing some “instant animation” by one of Altman’s drug sellers. First thought: Wow, that’s impressive! Second thought: Wait. 3d programs like Poser and Blender could do that sort of thing a long time ago. And I was writing Python programs to automate those moves 20 years ago. Natural facial expressions, natural body…
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Extremely positive signs from schools!
1. Enid High has an aviation class. They spent the last three years BUILDING THEIR OWN AIRPLANE! It has been certified as flightworthy by FAA. It’s a beautiful plane and a fantastic achievement. 2. On a much smaller scale, nice to see a school teaching math the RIGHT way! Cheney High, south of Spokane, is…
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Raking record
Time to start the roof-raking record for this winter. As always, this should be in my private daily worklog, but I started doing it here, so I’ll continue the tradition. = = = = Last winter started late and needed only one raking. First raking this year Jan 8. Depth was 3″, not necessarily enough…
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LemonADA 5
Basic rule for inventions, genomes and languages: The original version starts with all the needed features. Over time as it branches into different subtypes for different purposes, it simplifies and loses features. While grinding through my courseware data files to insert alt-text for screen readers, I’m bumping into a few vestigial leftovers of a MUCH…
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Signal for 2026
Found in this afternoon’s walk: A real pencil, clearly well used. Nice signal from the analog universe.
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LemonADA 3
Damn, this is turning out to be fun! Lemon: Last night I was thinking about other pointless expenditures caused by ADA, especially the curb cuts in places where there isn’t a sidewalk. Thought derailed to traffic lights with announcements on the Walk cycle. 20, 19, 18, 17, etc. LemonADA: Well, those lights turned out to…
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More LemonADA
Following on previous LemonADA item. Lemon: Had a moment of panic this morning. While running up ADA alt-texts for the second courseware package I noticed that the source files I’m using aren’t up to date, and I can’t find the latest ones. Back in 2023 the current publisher finally acquired the rights for some better…
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Thanks, Avista!
Yesterday was a bad windstorm. Not as bad as 2015 or 2021, but significant. After it was done at noon yesterday, about 1/4 of Spokane was powerless. Avista got to work, and this morning ALL of those outages are fixed. The map has a few brand-new outages, probably trees that were leaning after yesterday and…
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LemonAIde
I’ve been writing this blog for 20 years. Until this year I usually had two or three semi-regular readers. This year the humans are gone, leaving nothing but AI bots. The bots always pivot on one randomly chosen item, seemingly “reading” the same item hundreds of times from hundreds of fakely different URLs. This item…
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Update at last on Hilderbrand
The fake “shutdown” didn’t affect me in any meaningful way. I can’t figure out what the politicians hope to accomplish by playing this game. They weren’t solving any problems before the “shutdown”, and they’re not solving any problems now. The “shutdown” doesn’t change anything. The “shutdown” did prevent me from satisfying my curiosity and reaching…
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Start with quality.
Last week I wrote up a contest between the first coast-to-coast airmail flight and a group of Essex cars. The cars won. Hudson touted the event in a 1922 pamphlet which omits the airmail comparison entirely. By this account the project was originated by the Post Office in an attempt to widen the range of…
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Regrowth
From RealClear, an article with hopeful signs. The article misses the former strength of smaller cities. It mocks the NYC bigotry but basically agrees with NYC that the universe ends at the Hudson River. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New…
Polistra's Mill 